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Matt (foodie friend from London) was in town last week, and being that this was his first ever visit to the Bay Area, Tracey and I felt obligated to show him the highlights of the vaunted SF restaurant scene. And obviously, we’d have to take him out for sushi, since London’s sushi is always expensive and usually crap.

But where to go? We racked our brains for a place in town that would be worth crossing eight time zones, and couldn’t come up with anything that fit the bill. In a final act of desperation, I started digging through Zagat and came across the listing for Sushi Ran. Now that’s what I’m talking about. Tracey and I had been there for lunch last month and were very impressed, but we had completely forgotten about it in our frenzy to find a place within the 7×7. Fortunately, booking with only a day’s notice was no problem for a Wednesday night, and so we made the picturesque (even at night!) trek across the bridge to Sausalito. Continue reading →

Food fads can be a real hoot to watch. Take for example, the whole Raw Milk debate: some folks claim that heat destroys many of the health benefits of milk produced by grass-fed cows. So now you can buy unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk, if you know where to look. Milk sold in this form is visually different than “normal” milk–you know the saying “the cream rises to the top”? Well, now you know where that came from.

But what if you want the look of raw milk, but you’re a little freaked out about the prospect of all of those little microorganisms saturating your chocolate-chip cookie? Or maybe you’re a dairy farmer whose barn isn’t quite clean enough to safely produce milk that isn’t subjected to a very reliable industrial sterilization process? Well, there’s a new product for you–“Cream Top” milk!

A little help, here?

OK, OK, there are a few of issues. First of all, there’s the name. Cream Top? It sounds like a particularly disgusting genre of pornography. Second, theres’s obviously a teeny-weeny problem with, well… GETTING THE MILK OUT OF THE BOTTLE when you first open it. The label implores one to shake the bottle before pouring, but unfortunately, that cream forms an impenetrable capsule impervious to (at least my) best efforts at shaking. So you’ll have to use a knife or something to puncture the cream in order to pour the milk.

The third problem is that the now-dislodged cream cap will now break into many smaller chunks that float around in the milk. Again, the solution here is supposed to be shaking. (Presumably, the people who like this product are pretty good at violently flailing their limbs.) Unfortunately, the cap provided with the bottle is a little bit tricky, and if you’re not EXTREMELY CAREFUL, you’ll end up with skim spray and cream chunks all over the kitchen.

Tracey and I dined at Bar Tartine last night–excellent night out. The space is one of those really narrow ones that you often see in San Francisco, but rather than pushing the kitchen all the way to the back, Usability they’ve divided the back half of the restaurant lengthwise with the eponymous bar and used it to divide the diners from the chefs. The place Disposables is fairly romantic, with a very beautiful chandelier made of… antlers. Sounds bizarre, but it works. Continue reading →

Yesterday, Mrs. Inferno and I (courtesy of my gracious cousin Jamie) took a day trip down to the Google campus in ???? Mountain View to sample some of the cheap MLB jerseys fine, free food and to listen to a talk given by Ferran Adria, the chef who’s usually credited with kicking off the whole Molecular Gastronomy/Postmodern Cuisine/Mr. Марацци Wizard Meal movement. Adria talked quite a bit about the unique nature of haute cuisine vis-à-vis artistic a creativity, which had a couple of interesting parallels and contrasts to the world of software development. Continue reading →